Notes from the field in the War on Spam

Bad Behavior 1.2.1

Bad Behavior 1.2.1 has been released to address issues people are having with whitelists not working, and with Google Desktop causing users to be blocked from the site. Bad Behavior is the Web’s premier link spam killer, protecting blogs, wikis, forums and CMS systems all over the Internet.

Obviously we’re not all perfect. A ridiculous omission caused Bad Behavior’s new whitelisting feature to simply not work. In order for whitelisting to work, install Bad Behavior 1.2.1. In addition, Google’s new Google Desktop is sending invalid HTTP headers to every site its users visit, causing Bad Behavior 1.2 sites to blacklist them.

Access will be automatically restored to affected users within 48 hours of installing the update, or you can empty the bad_behavior_log table after installing the update to restore access to affected users immediately.

Last night, Matt managed to get himself blocked from the MikeCam by an anti-spam plugin I’m using called “Bad Behavior” when he installed Google Desktop 2 and used it to try and add an RSS feed from my blog. As it turns out, Matt&#8…

Have you had reports of 1.2.1 causing people issues? I finally got around to doing an upgrade today and have had multiple reports of issues, with people both on and without firewalls who didn’t have issues with the last version I’d installed [1.1.4]. I deactivated, overwrote files, and reactivated in every situation, too, so I’m a bit miffed …

Geof, yes, I’ve heard of issues with 1.2.1, and all of them have been traced to one or more of the following causes:

A proxy server stripping HTML headers and making the user look like a spammer
A newly received dynamic IP address, where the previous holder of the IP address was sending spam
A user whose computer has been compromised and is itself sending spam

Your users having problems are going to fall into the first and third categories, most likely.